Slight tweak in blog template

A couple hours I posted the announcement for C&I 9.3 (below), there was a comment on it on FriendFeed from Polly Potter, noting my suggestion that people not use white text on a dark background in their blogs. She noted that light gray text on a light background can also be difficult to read.

Which is true enough (and is one of my complaints about FriendFeed, actually: comments appear as light gray text), but I wondered if it was more pointed…

OK; after looking at it, I’ve changed the template so that block-quoted text (and some other odd varieties that don’t happen very often), instead of being color #777, a fairly light gray, are now color #222, a very dark gray (on my display, it’s indistinguishable from black).

Better or worse? Less elegant, I think, but more readable–a choice I’m willing to make.

Update: I played with it a little more. It’s now #333, which is distinguishably lighter than black on a good display, but still very high contrast. Now if FriendFeed would use something closer to black for comment text…

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 8th, 2009 at 3:57 pm and is filed under Writing and blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Walt, you should look in to the Stylish plugin for Firefox. I downloaded someone’s “Better FriendFeed” style which makes it more legible to me, though I don’t know that it changes the text color. But with Stylish, it would be easy enough to add another rule to take care of that.

There are several tools online for checking color contrast to see whether it meets a standard minimum. This one looks good:

Here’s another example of one thing I noted in my “Shiny toys or useful tools?” talk and article: You really can’t predict when a blog post will (or won’t) draw comments–unless it’s about death, birth, divorce, marriage or a new job.

*All Cites & Insights PDF ebooks are explicitly site-licensed for
mounting on a library's server and providing to authenticated users. That
includes The Gold OA Landscape 2011-2014, A Library Is..., Beyond the
Damage and any others.